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Virtual tailor measures you up for perfect online shop

Body scanners and virtual fitting rooms could solve the common problem of clothes ordered online being too baggy or tight

By Rachel Nuwer

Clothes will hug every contour

(Image: Arden Reed)

IT’S the curse of online clothes shopping. You come across a shirt you simply must have, only to find that what you receive doesn’t fit despite being in your size. How can you order clothes with confidence when you can’t try them on?

A new wave of start-ups are finding clever ways to address the problem. Virtual fitting rooms are one solution. The London-based firm Fits.me, founded in 2010, creates them for brands such as Hugo Boss and Superdry. The company teamed up with researchers at several universities to build robot mannequins that can adjust their proportions to match just about any set of human measurements.

To set up the fitting room, developers run through most of the size-shape combinations the dummies can assume, and take several thousand photos of them dressed in every available size of each shirt or dress, from extra small to XXXL. Software then looks at measurements keyed in by shoppers, such as height, arm length and collar size, and displays the mannequin photo set that best matches their body trying on clothes in sizes the user is interested in. Potential problems – where a shirt is too tight, for example – are flagged up. In a trial involving the British clothing brand Henri Lloyd, the return rate for garments was 4.5 per cent for a group of customers who used the software, compared with 15.3 per cent for a group that did not.

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Another start-up wants to redefine our system for sizing clothes. “We think it’s kind of ridiculous that, despite all of us coming in so many different shapes and sizes, we’re stuck with small, medium and large,” says Matt Hornbuckle, co-founder of Stantt, a New Jersey-based firm that manufactures men’s shirts to fit 70 sets of body measurements.

To arrive at these, Hornbuckle hired another company to analyse 200,000 measurements of men’s bodies, looking for correlations. It found that three numbers – chest size, waist and sleeve length – are enough to predict which of those 70 options would best fit someone. Stantt’s first shirts, priced at &dollar;98, will ship in May. The company’s recent Kickstarter campaign raised &dollar;120,000 and collected pre-orders for around 1000 shirts – a sign, Hornbuckle says, that customers are eager for change. “The retail store itself, and how they operate, is becoming obsolete,” he says.

Arden Reed, a New York-based start-up, wants to take this personalised approach a step further with its bespoke suits. Six months ago, the company began sizing customers using a remodelled truck equipped with a 3D body scanner. It has 14 Kinect sensors that record around 1.5 million body contour points in a process lasting 10 minutes. The readings are converted into measurements for the tailoring to be outsourced to China, and customers receive their suit six weeks later for between &dollar;500 and &dollar;1500. They can order more in the same size online.

Kinect sensors record 1.5 million body contour points, for the tailoring to be outsourced to China

The scanner has ventured to Boston and Washington DC, and will debut in Miami this year. “The truck concept allows us to not limit ourselves to a store,” says Carlos Solorio, Arden Reed’s co-founder. Stantt and Arden Reed now want to expand their range to include women’s clothing.

“There’s no question that virtual fitting tools will become a standard part of online shopping,” says Fits.me CEO Heikki Haldre.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Perfect fashion by numbers”